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How much should I analyze my competitors?

Recently I've started a competitor research (aka competitive analysis). A few hours after I began, I've started to feel that maybe I'm doing too much unnecessary work.

What I've been doing so far is analyzing the competitor's links (using the Dr Pete's Link Profiling excel and some other things), and their site optimization. The on-site optimization analysis has been very light, just to see if the competitors are doing something really well, or not.

But still, I think that maybe I'm doing too much work.

So, I'd like to see your thoughs: How much work is necessary when doing competitor analysis? What things do you analyse? And how much do you report to the clients?

2 Responses

Take a quick peek at their backlink profiles and top metrics once a month to see if they've had any changes in their strategies or partnerships that you're able to see. I would also monitor mentions of their brand (social and blogs/publications). It'll keep your finger on the pulse of who is talking about them, what they're doing, who they're partnering with, what kind of press they're getting etc.

We typically do quarterly reviews of competitors. This involved a lot of different things, for example, we may look at their top metrics (backlinks, referring domains, anchor percentages) to notice any major changes, look at their visibility (where they're ranking overall in the space for whatever buckets/topics we're monitoring), what kind of pickup they've gotten, if they're heavy publishers then we look at what content went out that month and how it performed, amongst other things. The depth and items really vary because it's tailored to the client, what we initially found during the auditing phase, and what kind of strategy we've implemented.

How much work is necessary when doing competitor analysis? What things do you analyse?

I look at the content on the first page of the SERPs for the keywords that I will compete for. If I think that I can beat that content or at least be reasonably competitive then I will start working. I don't look at anything else other than make note of which domains are competing. If the domains are ones that I have not heard of then I feel that I have picked a good place to compete.

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